(I received a free advanced copy of this from NetGalley in exchange for this review.)

Most of us like to act like our jobs are hell. But what if your j(I received a free advanced copy of this from NetGalley in exchange for this review.)

Most of us like to act like our jobs are hell. But what if your job actually was in Hell? Then bitching about the broken microwave in the break room would seem kind of silly.

Hell may no longer go in for casting sinners into burning lakes of fire, but it’s still all about the eternal torment. Now human souls are fished out of the sea of Limbo and crammed into human meat suits and live a grubby existence where they are abused by the demons who treat them like second class citizens. The lucky ones may have some kind of factory or farm job where they get to toil all day and live in crowded shabby rooms with few comforts. Unlucky ones get jobs like being sex toys for the demons, and they have a very short shelf life.

And just because you’re dead and in Hell doesn’t mean you can’t be murdered. Demons routinely kill the humans which sends their souls back to Limbo. Thomas Fool is one of Hell’s Information Men, a kind of detective who gets his assignments via Hell’s vast bureaucracy and spends most of his time stamping paperwork Did Not Investigate for the many crimes committed by the demons against the humans. As he’s acting as an escort for a couple of angels on an official trip from Heaven, Fool is assigned to look into a brutal and unusual murder where there are no traces of the soul left in the body, and the Information Man finds himself actually following through on an investigation for once which causes ripples of change throughout Hell.

The idea of a detective in Hell could have been the premise for some kind of urban fantasy novel with a Fool being a smart-ass anti-hero with the rough edges of the setting sanded off for easy consumption. However, debut novelist Simon Kurt Unsworth does a very nice job of creating a Hell that really feels like hellish. The descriptions of the graphic violence don’t skimp on the horror, and he’s come up with some truly terrifying types of demons. There's also some nice world building done with Hell's history and how it operates.

What’s best is the tone he hits at making Hell feel like a place devoid of hope in such a regular everyday way that it’s the banality that is ultimately the worst part of it. With a grungy, dismal vibe to the place, and the blah meaningless of people doing thankless tasks for a faceless bureaucracy, it’s kind of like Fool is working for a large corporation in an atmosphere with no real pleasure. It's an especially nice touch that none of the humans have any memory of who they were or what their sin was. They just know that they did something they deserve to be punished for. The mystery part seemed kind of obvious to me,but there’s still a great ending I didn’t see coming.

All in all, this was a clever and unique debut novel that makes me hope we’ll be seeing more from Unsworth.

"This rich and disturbing novel spans five decades on its way to the most terrifying conclusion Stephen KiFrom the synopsis on Stephen King’s website:

"This rich and disturbing novel spans five decades on its way to the most terrifying conclusion Stephen King has ever written."

That’s a bold statement that sets the bar very high for Revival. So does it clear it?

Almost. I think. If it doesn’t then it comes damn close which still makes this a pretty impressive achievement for Uncle Steve at this point in his long career.

Jamie Morton first meets Reverend Charles Jacobs when he’s a 6 year old kid in Maine during the early ‘60s. Jacobs is a popular minister with a pretty wife and infant son, and he loves fiddling with electrical gadgets. Jamie and Jacobs have a bond from the moment they meet that is cemented later when Jacobs aids a member of Jamie’s family. After a tragedy drives Jacobs out of town, Jamie profoundly feels the loss, but time marches on. When he becomes a teenager Jamie discovers he has some musical talent and as an adult he makes a living as a rhythm guitar player in bar bands. But Jamie hasn’t seen the last of Jacobs as their paths cross again and again over the years and each strange encounter leaves Jamie increasingly worried about what Jacobs is up to.

I’ve seen complaints from some readers that this is too slow and that the ending doesn’t live up to the hype. I can understand why. The readers’ impressions of it are probably going to be determined by how well the punch King spends the entire book setting us all up for landed. If it was a glancing blow, then you’ll shrug it off. After all, there are no evil clowns or haunted hotels or telekinetic teenagers getting buckets of pig blood dumped over them. The book could almost be one of those VH1 Behind the Music bios about Jamie Morton if King doesn’t pull off the last act for you.

But if that punch lands solidly… If, like me, King catches you squarely with that jab of an ending, then you’re going to be lying on the floor looking up at the ceiling with a bloody nose and spitting broken teeth as you mumble, “The horror….the horror…”

What made that ending so powerful? * (view spoiler)[ The idea that death is merely a doorway that has leads every person to a HP Lovecraft nightmare of an afterworld where all spend an eternity damned and enslaved is something that I’d think would the terrify everyone from the very religious to the skeptical atheist. Good or bad, believer or non-believer, we all end up in the same place. Death isn’t the gateway to the magical place where you’ll see grandma and all your pets again. It isn’t even a long dark dreamless sleep. It’s the start of a torment that will never end. And there is no escape from it.

That’s the kind of idea that could make even a writer like Cormac McCarthy break into tears as he wails, “King, you went too far!”

I think this has an extra jolt because Uncle Steve has never been shy about heaping misery on characters, but generally for him death is the end of it. Even in one of his other most disturbing books, Pet Semetary the message is that ‘Sometimes dead is better.’ Not this time. King wrote something where there is no safe harbor, no hope, no end…

But I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords….. (Sorry, it had to be said.) (hide spoiler)]

I’ll be thinking about this one for a while, and it could end fairly high in my personal ranking of King novels after some reflection. Probably not top five, but maybe top fifteen or even top ten. However, I think it’s got a serious chance of being the one I find the most disturbing of them all.

* - Any comments about the ending that aren't hidden by a spoiler tag will be deleted. Sorry, but I don't want anyone who hasn't read it getting spoiled on this review.

Also posted at Kemper's Book Blog.["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>...more

Scott Smith’s wrote one of my favorite crime novels with A Simple Plan that released in 1993. Thirteen years later came his second book, The Ruins, whScott Smith’s wrote one of my favorite crime novels with A Simple Plan that released in 1993. Thirteen years later came his second book, The Ruins, which instantly became one of my favorite horror novels. I’ve got my fingers crossed that sometime later this decade he’ll write another one and maybe it’ll turn out to be the greatest sci-fi epic I’ve ever read.

The concept here is dirt simple. Idiots go somewhere they shouldn’t and bad shit happens. In this particular case four American college students, two boy-girl couples, are on vacation in Mexico where they meet several other tourists from all over the world. A German named Mathis tells them that his brother got smitten with a woman and followed her to an archaeological dig in the jungle, and that he needs to retrieve him before their flight home. The Americans and another Greek fellow decide to join him and set out on an impromptu adventure following a hand drawn map to a remote location.

A bunch of unprepared and ill-equipped tourists wander off into the jungle? What could possibly go wrong?

After they find themselves trapped on a hilltop, the young people struggle against something almost beyond belief as they endure thirst, hunger and injuries and have to consider extreme actions in order to survive.

The sub-title of this book could almost be A Series of Bad Decisions, and that’s one of the aspects that made it unique for me. A lot of horror is based around punishing people for their actions. Frankenstein gets his monster for daring to try to change the natural order. Jason slaughters teenagers for acting like teenagers. In The Ruins there is no single moment of arrogance or failure of character to point out as the thing that bring about the situation. (Although there are plenty of small examples of rotten behavior that make it that much worse.) Rather it’s just the sunny optimism that everything will be OK that puts these kids in a leaky canoe headed up that fabled Shit Creek with no paddles.

Smith does a great job of playing off the human nature of being in a bad spot and then wondering how you got there only to have the sickening realization that you knew for a while that you heading into trouble but you somehow talked yourself into staying the course it with the assumption that everything would work itself out.

The characters themselves are a departure from what you get in most horror novels these days. Yeah, I know some people hated them, and they truly are a pack of insufferable dumb asses for a large part of the book. But I think what some readers really didn’t like about them was that they did act the way most of us would in those circumstances. For example, Jeff tries to play the hero, and while you can empathize with his frustrations with the others, he’s also being a complete douche bag for not acknowledging the bigger picture and the others also act with varying amounts of denial and panic.

What’s interesting is that there are no easy answers as to how they should be behaving. (Serious spoilers here.) (view spoiler)[Jeff’s insistence on amputating Pablo’s legs and trying to convince the others to eat the corpse of another illustrates that you can make a bad situation worse by trying to do the right thing. On the other hand, sitting around and drinking tequila is criminally irresponsible on the part of Amy, Eric and Stacy. (hide spoiler)] So there’s this uncomfortable push-pull between the traditional concept of doing every single desperate thing you can think of to survive versus realizing that you’re fucked and just giving up. That’s the grey zone where this book operates and part of what I found so compelling about it.

I’ve seen some complaints about the nature of the threat, and I’m not sure if that’s still considered a spoiler or not so I’m throwing it under a tag. However, I’m only discussing what they’re facing, not giving up any plot details. (view spoiler)[ OK, so it’s a plant, and I get why some are skeptical of the concept. The mystery probably didn't help that when it first came out because some people were expecting a chupacabra or jungle cannibals or something along those lines so that when the reveal came, the first reaction was “They’re fighting a fucking plant?” I remember being surprised and wary the first time I read this, plus the stuff about it being an intelligent and mimicking sounds did strike me as far-fetched. But is it really any more fantastic than vampires, zombies, werewolves or Texas chainsaw massacres? In the end, the insidious nature of the vines became another major plus of the book for me. (hide spoiler)]

So this one retains its high spot among my personal rankings after reading it a second time. It’s not your typical horror tale, and it’s a gruesome story that shows people behaving poorly in dire circumstances which makes it an uncomfortable read at times. But isn’t that the point?["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>...more

By simply touching anyone, Miriam gets a vision of the exact date, time and circumstances of anyone’You may not want to shake hands with Miriam Black.

By simply touching anyone, Miriam gets a vision of the exact date, time and circumstances of anyone’s death. The bitch of the situation is that she can’t do anything to change it. In fact, by trying to stop it, she may actually cause it to occur. Since she feels like a helpless puppet to fate, Miriam has taken up a nomadic existence of roaming America’s highways that she funds by being around to loot the wallets and purses of anyone who goes toes up. After she meets a friendly trucker named Louis and gets a vision of his brutal homicide caused by him meeting her, a horrified Miriam tries to get away from him. However, events involving con man, a couple of killers and one creepy drug dealer draw her back to Louis and seem to confirm that fate won’t be thwarted.

This is an odd one in that the main character is simultaneously the best and worst part of the book. The idea of a young woman trying to outrun the gift/curse of being able to know how anyone will die but being helpless to stop it was a helluva of an intriguing concept. It’s certainly understandable that Miriam would turn into a drifter with a bad attitude and a love of booze and cigarettes.

Unfortunately, she drifts a bit too far towards being a glib smart-ass who is delighting in her self-destruction rather than a tragic figure. It’s a difficult line to walk because it’d be tiresome if she was a hand-wringing guilt-ridden mess for the entire book, and there’s a certain charm to her frank appraisal of her situation and her own nature. But at that same time it seemed like she also took a giddy joy in her circumstances that gives her a license to not give a damn. That could be interesting angle for the character too, but it always played as just a bit off to me.

I still enjoyed the book overall. It’s a fast paced supernatural road story with some colorful villains and a nice hook of Miriam’s spooky ability. For being a violent story about death, it’s got some good laughs to it, too. I just wish that Miriam wasn’t quite so delighted in her misery of being fate’s butt monkey....more

Remember that psychic little kid in The Shining? Have you ever wondered what he’d be like as an adult after surviving a haunted hotel that drove his dRemember that psychic little kid in The Shining? Have you ever wondered what he’d be like as an adult after surviving a haunted hotel that drove his drunken father crazy and gave him a case of the redrums? If so, you’re in luck because Stephen King has now told us what happened to Danny Torrance, and he’s just as screwed up from his experience as you’d expect him to be.

Like his father, Dan has grown up to be a bad tempered drunk, and he uses the booze to blot out his psychic powers as he drifts from town to town working menial jobs. The early part of the book focuses on Dan hitting bottom, and then trying to pull himself together with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. He winds up with a job as an orderly at a hospice where he earns the nickname of Doctor Sleep for his ability to provide an easier death for the patients.

Dan becomes aware of a little girl named Abra with a shining ability that dwarfs his own, but unfortunately Abra has also come to the attention of group of vampire like creatures calling themselves the True Knot. They pretend to be humans who roam the country as a harmless pack of tourists in RVs while they track down and feed on the psychic energy collected from torturing children with the shining, and Abra would be like an all-you-can-eat buffet to them.

This book is almost two separate stories. One is about Dan Torrance struggling to come to terms with the legacy of his father, his abilities and his alcoholism. The other is about the battle to save a little girl from a pack of vicious monsters. King does a decent job of trying to make these two tales intersect while revisiting some elements from The Shining, but it ends up feeling like less than the sum of its parts. Frankly, I was far more interested in Dan’s battle with the bottle than another Stephen King story about a child in danger from a supernatural threat.

It’s not that Abra vs. the True Knot is bad. There’s a lot of genuinely creepy dread to be mined from a pack of psychic vampires roaming the country while posing as harmless middle aged farts, and King knows how to milk every drop out of that concept. And I liked the character of Abra a lot. The idea of a powerfully psychic young girl with a bit of a mean streak was great. Kinda like if Carrie White would have had decent parents and a happy childhood.

In fact, Abra’s a little bit too powerful because she seems fully capable of kicking ass even during her first encounter with the True Knot. So while there’s a lot of nice build-up, most of what happens seems anti-climatic. (view spoiler)[ Abra and Dan pretty much settle the True Knot’s hash with only minor injuries to a supporting character and no real lasting damage. That just seems weird in a Stephen King novel which generally feature wholesale carnage and a lot more collateral damage from the bad guys. (hide spoiler)]

Plus, while there’s some callbacks to The Shining, they mostly feel tacked on, as if King had this basic idea and then figured out ways to work in Dan’s history where he could. It’s not really organic and doesn’t seem necessary. I also think there’s a gaping plot hole in the True Knot’s key motivation to grab Abra and their scheme. (view spoiler)[ Supposedly the TKs have been around for a very long time, and yet it’s the measles they get from taking the steam from a kid that sickens them so that they think they need Abra because she’s been vaccinated. So in all their years of kid killing, including back in olden days of yore, they never snatched a kid with measles or chicken pox or polio or typhoid or something? And somehow all the children they’ve taken in modern times weren’t vaccinated against measles? None of this made a lot of sense to me. (hide spoiler)]

One word of warning for those who have only seen the movie and not read the book, King is basing this on his version, not the film and there a couple of significant differences. (I got a laugh that King couldn’t resist taking yet another shot at the Kubrick adaptation in the author’s note afterwards. I don’t think he’s ever getting over his dislike of the movie.) Also, I listened to the audio version of this, and the narration by Will Patton is simply outstanding.

I feared the idea of King returning to one of his best known works, but it turned out to be a remarkably solid effort with a lot of things I liked about it. I only wish that that I’d have found the rest of the book as compelling as finding out what kind of man the kid from the Overlook Hotel grew up to be.["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>...more

Even though the film version of this one from Stanley Kubrick is generally considered a horror classic, Stephen King has never been shy about making hEven though the film version of this one from Stanley Kubrick is generally considered a horror classic, Stephen King has never been shy about making his dislike of it known. He hates it so much that he was heavily involved in making a more faithful adaptation of it as TV mini-series in 1997. (This inferior version invited comparisons of Stephen Weber from Wings to one of Jack Nicholson’s most iconic performances. So that worked well….)

Considering Uncle Stevie’s longstanding grudge about it, I was more than a little shocked when he recently made a public plea for fans of Under the Dome to accept the changes that the new TV show was making. I can’t quite wrap my head around why a genius director creating something new and brilliant based on his story is bad, but anything that a fairly shitty TV show does with the source material is A-OK with King?

Whatever….

On to the book. As most everyone knows, this is about a family spending the winter in a haunted hotel in the Rocky Mountains called the Overlook. Jack Torrance was a teacher and promising writer, but his alcoholism and short temper wrecked his career and very nearly ended his marriage. Jack has been sober over a year, and he and Wendy have started down the path of reconciliation. However, she can never entirely forgive him for breaking the arm of their son Danny in an incident that was equal parts rage and accident. Five year old Danny has psychic mojo that includes reading thoughts and precognition courtesy of visions shown to him by his imaginary friend, Tony.

Nearly broke, Jack takes on the job of being the winter caretaker for the Overlook. This means that the family will spend months alone in the hotel once the snow flies, and the last caretaker went axe-happy and killed his family. Unfortunately, the Overlook is like an emotional sponge that has soaked in every ugly act that ever took place within its rooms, and the presence of a high-powered psychic like Danny kicks the place into overdrive. As Jack is being driven into madness, Wendy and Danny become increasingly terrified of what he might do.

I once read something in which King talked about denial of his own substance abuse problems in which he noted that he somehow wrote The Shining without ever once realizing he was describing his own alcoholism. That element of the Jack Torrence character is what makes this one of his better books. The idea of being trapped in a hotel with a bunch of ghosts is scary in a horror story kind of way. The idea of being trapped in a hotel with an ill-tempered drunk with a history of violence as he is cracking up is downright terrifying.

Adding even more weight to that idea is that Jack Torrance isn’t a monster. He’s a troubled man who does love his wife and son, and he’s self-aware enough to realize that he’s on the brink. He’ll either turn his life around and earn his wife’s trust back, or he’ll give in to his own worst impulses. This would be hard enough under any circumstances, but under the influence of the evil spirits of the Overlook, Jack becomes a tragedy.

Another element jumped out at me while re-reading this time. King talked in his non-fiction Danse Macabre (Which I remember as being entertaining, but probably very dated by now. I would be very interested if Uncle Stevie wanted to take another look at what’s become of the horror genre since he wrote that one.) about the economic factor of The Amityville Horror and how a part of why the movie worked was that the family was essentially trapped by their finances.

He uses that idea to good effect here. Most people would run screaming from the Overloook in less than a week, but we’re frequently reminded that the Torrance family was swirling the drain financially. If the perception is that Jack botched this job, his last chance to get back to a more stable lifestyle is probably shot and that goes a long way towards allowing him to convince himself and Wendy that they’re overreacting to the weird occurrences during the early stages, and by the time they’ve become snowed in, the Overlook has its hooks deep into Jack.

It’s those more mundane things like a family struggling with money and that an evil entity turns one of them against the others by playing on his inherent weaknesses that make this one of my favorite King novels. ...more

As a little girl Victoria McQueen has a magical talent for finding things. While riding her bike and focusing on what she’s looking for, Vic can conjuAs a little girl Victoria McQueen has a magical talent for finding things. While riding her bike and focusing on what she’s looking for, Vic can conjure up an old wooden bridge that she can cross and be at the spot where the lost object is. Vic mainly uses her powers to distract herself from the constant fighting of her parents, and she eventually meets an eccentric librarian named Maggie with her own supernatural power who explains that Vic is tapping into imagination itself and plowing tunnels through it.

Maggie also warns Vic about Charlie Manx, another person with special talents who kidnaps children and takes them to a place called Christmasland in his 1938 Rolls Royce Wraith with plates that read NOS4A2. (Or Nosferatu for those of you, like me, who can’t stand not being able to figure out a personalized plate.)

Vic eventually runs across Charlie during her travels, and the encounter doesn’t go well for either of them. Years later, Vic’s adult life has been a steady descent into what seems like madness, but she’s trying to finally repair her relationship with her son when Charlie returns.

It’s probably inevitable that Joe Hill will be compared to his father Stephen King whether it’s fair or not, but the concept and characters seem very much like old school King to me. However, it’s hard to see how Hill could possibly not be influenced by the old man, and in this case, that makes for a tense and fascinating horror novel.

The villains really stood out in this one. Charlie Manx isn’t really a vampire, but he exists in a way by sucking the life out of children. However, since he legitimately sees himself as saving kids from worse fates and providing them with an eternity of fun, it makes him more interesting than just a monster who gets his jollies by murdering kids. Charlie’s sidekick, Bing Partridge, is a simpleton who is terrifying in his role as the Gasmask Man that wants to help Mr. Manx to earn himself a permanent place in Christmasland.

But it’s Vic McQueen that really made me love this story. As a bright kid with a knack for art, it’s painful to see how her ability and meeting Charlie Manx seriously screws her up life. Hill has created a believable and damaged woman who writes and illustrates kid’s books, but also has tattoos and a drinking problem. Vic is a graduate of the Lisbeth Salander Charm School, and she’ll hit you in the face with the wrench she’s using to fix a motorcycle if you give her any grief.

The book has a couple of problems. At almost 700 pages, Joe Hill apparently inherited King’s penchant for writing big books. While the action does move along at a pretty swift pace it still seems like it could have been tightened up. (In Hill’s defense, his stuff moves much faster than his dad. If King would have done this story, it probably would have been 1200+ pages.) There’s also some plot inconsistencies. (view spoiler)[Going across the bridge at the beginning of the book gives Vic blinding headaches and can incapacitate her for days, but at the end she’s doing multiple hops and not suffering nearly as much as she did earlier. With the point that the more you use the gift, the bigger the toll like Maggie’s increasing stammer, you’d think Vic’s head would have exploded well before the end of the book.

I also thought Hill overdid how much physical abuse Vic takes. It made sense that she’d be fairly used up by making it to the final confrontation in Christmasland, but with the beating she took along the way, I had a hard time believing that she was still conscious, let alone able to tear ass around on her motorcycle. (hide spoiler)]

None of my minor gripes prevented me from thoroughly enjoying this very creepy action horror novel with a memorable main character.

One more note, I listened to the audible version of this, and it was narrated by Kate Mulgrew who gave an absolutely incredible reading of it with multiple character voices. It was especially fun because of Vic’s foul mouth which made it sound like Captain Janeway was cursing people like a drunken sailor. Engage, you bastards!

Also posted at Shelf Inflicted["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>...more

When it comes to Hannibal Lecter, I’m like one of those music hipster douche bags that everyone hates because I’ll snootily declare that I knew aboutWhen it comes to Hannibal Lecter, I’m like one of those music hipster douche bags that everyone hates because I’ll snootily declare that I knew about him long before most people did and that he’s sucked ever since he got really famous.

I’d read this years before the book of The Silence of the Lambs came out and led to the excellent film adaptation that skyrocketed Hannibal to the top of pop culture villains. Hell, I’m so Hannibal-hip that I’d caught Brian Cox playing him in Michael Mann’s adaptation Manhunter, and I didn’t just see it on VHS like all the other late-comers, I actually saw it in the theater. Twice! (I’m pretty sure this is the literary equivalent of claiming to have seen a band in a bar with eleven other people long before their first record deal.)

So after Thomas Harris and Hollywood ran the character into the ground after the second movie, it’s been years of shaking my head and saying, “Man, nothing’s been the same since Anthony Hopkins gave his Oscar acceptance speech.”

Since I felt like Harris was just cashing in and had pretty much ruined Hannibal in the process, I hadn’t felt the urge to revisit Red Dragon or The Silence of the Lambs in some time. I was more than skeptical about the NBC prequel TV series Hannibal, but great reviews and the involvement of Bryan Fuller got me to check it out. Not only has it been incredibly good and returned Hannibal Lecter to his creepy best, it’s clever use of events referenced as backstory in Red Dragon had me digging out my copy to refresh my memory. Even better, the show has given me a new appreciation for an old favorite and reminded me what I found compelling about it to begin with.

Will Graham was a profiler for the FBI until he was badly injured while identifying a certain gourmet serial killer whose name conveniently rhymes with ‘cannibal’ which certainly made life easier for the people writing tabloid headlines. Will has retired to a happy new life with a wife and stepson in Florida until his old boss Jack Crawford comes calling and asks for help. There’s a brutal new killer dubbed the Tooth Fairy by the cops due to his habit of biting his victims. He’s killed two families after breaking into their homes and seems to be on schedule to do it again at the next full moon.

Will is reluctant to come back not just because he’s already been gutted once by a madman. He also fears that trying to think like a mass murderer isn’t the best thing for his mental health. It turns out that his concerns are justified after a tabloid journalist essentially paints a target on his back for the Tooth Fairy. Even worse, Will has to confront the man who nearly killed him and being confined to a cell doesn’t mean that Dr. Lecter can’t still do some serious damage.

Even as someone who was on the Hannibal bandwagon for a quarter of a century, it’s shocking to re-read this and realize how small of a part he actually plays in the story. Yes, he’s terrifying and his presence hangs over Will like a dark cloud, but he’s still a supporting player. Francis Dolarhyde (a/k/a The Red Dragon a/k/a The Tooth Fairy) may not have Hannibal’s culinary skills, but he’s one damn scary and slightly tragic villain while Will Graham makes for a damaged but compelling hero in the story.

I think one of the things I love best is just how much time is spent on how Will thinks. As a man with extremely high levels of empathy and a vivid imagination, Will’s ability to put himself in someone else’s shoes is a gift and a curse. Thinking like deranged killers has left him questioning if he might not be one of them, and it spills over all his emotions like a toxic oil spill.

By understanding their madness, Will can find the logic in their thinking, and it’s following that internal logic that allows Will to find the evidence they need. The breakthrough Will eventually makes is one of my all-time favorite examples of pure detection in the genre. It was in front of the reader the entire time, but it’s such an elegant solution that fits together so perfectly that Harris doesn’t have to engage in obscuring it with red herrings.

As a thriller that led to countless rip-offs and even the eventual collapse of the franchise due to it’s own success, it’s been often imitated but rarely equaled.

Rick’s group of survivors thought that their recent success in wiping out a huge herd of zombies along with finding that there were other communitiesRick’s group of survivors thought that their recent success in wiping out a huge herd of zombies along with finding that there were other communities nearby that they could start trading with had provided the first rays of sunshine in the long dark night that is The Walking Dead.

However, long time readers shouldn’t be surprised that was just writer Robert Kirkman setting us up like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown to kick. If you’re familiar with this series and still ended up flat on your back after he yanked the ball away, you got nobody to blame but yourself.

Following the classic lesson of George Romero, Kirkman again demonstrates that while zombies may be dangerous, it’s other people that are really terrifying. When Rick learned that the neighboring community had problems with a group called the Saviors, he thought that his battle-tested crew of crusty veterans was more than a match for some gang working a post-apocalyptic version of the protection racket. Unfortunately, Rick is wrong.

So very, very wrong.

The Saviors turn out to have a lot more members than anyone knew about, and their leader, Negan, is a vicious bastard who will make Rick wistfully think about the good ole days when he only had to deal with the Governor.

Seriously, (view spoiler)[ the scene where Rick and the others are helpless to do anything but watch as poor Glenn is beaten to death by Negan with a baseball bat was as hard to read as anything done yet in this series. And that’s saying something. (hide spoiler)]

So once again all is lost, and if you think it might get better soon, the next collection will be titled Abandon All Hope.* You know, just in case you hadn’t already…

*(I learned that they've changed the title of the next volume to What Comes After and ruined my joke. Thanks for nothing, Kirkman!)

Also posted at Kemper's Book Blog.["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>...more

It’s like all the best parts of The Road, The Walking Dead and Winter’s Bone.

Temple is a fifteen year old girl who has grown up in the ruins of AmeriIt’s like all the best parts of The Road, The Walking Dead and Winter’s Bone.

Temple is a fifteen year old girl who has grown up in the ruins of America following the zombie apocalypse. She wanders the remains like a post-apocalyptic tourist looking at the wonders created by a 'slick god' and encountering a variety of people along the way. Supremely capable and confident, Temple has little problem surviving and dispatching the 'meatskins' she runs across, but she winds up with a determined killer on her trail.

This is one of those books that fuses genre with literature, and it’s one of the best I’ve read that’s attempted that trick. Incredible writing not only establishes a completely new society and an unforgettable heroine as well as a rich supporting cast that’s well-plotted, it’s also all done is less than 250 pages. I got way more out this than the hundreds of pages of Justin Cronin’s bloated version of a monster apocalypse or Mira Grant’s overstuffed and repetitive take on the aftermath of a zombie uprising.

I found it a bit unbelievable that over a decade after the zombies took over that Temple can still find edible supplies in convenience stores and working cars so easily. Also, (view spoiler)[ I could have lived without the mutant inbred redneck clan. Zombies and dangerous humans were enough of a threat. This came close to pushing a story that had seemed incredibly realistic into horror movie territory. (hide spoiler)]

These are relatively minor gripes about a haunting story that’s going to stick with me. ["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>...more

What’s this? Faint signs of hope? A small sliver of optimism in a world filled with death and despair? I must have picked up the wrong book. This can’What’s this? Faint signs of hope? A small sliver of optimism in a world filled with death and despair? I must have picked up the wrong book. This can’t be a Walking Dead collection. Let me check the cover….. Huh. I’ll be damned.

Rick and the small community of people who have managed to avoid becoming zombie chow are trying to find enough food to survive a winter and keep the undead from bunching up at their walls when a stranger shows up. The guy looks like Jesus and has the fighting skills of the X-Men’s Gambit, and he’s got a story that seems too good to be true.

Jesus Gambit claims to be the representative of a community of over two hundred people who have carved out a safe zone and trades with other communities in the area, and he wants Rick’s people to join in. Since Rick has had some pretty shitty luck with strangers, he is more than wary of Jesus Gambit’s offer. In fact, some worry that Rick’s suspicion is going to cause Jesus Gambit’s people to not work with them.

In a normal Walking Dead story, everything should go to hell with lots of people getting dead, and Rick ending up in ever more desperate circumstances. But there’s a change in this that could be the beginning of a new phase where Rick and company begin to build a new world rather than just try to survive the wreckage of the old one.

Or Kirkman could just pull the rug out from under them and have a whole bunch of them eaten by zombies or murdered or raped or have their limbs chopped off, etc. etc.

Looking back at it, I’m not even sure why I read this book. The Passage left so little impression on me that I remembered almost nothing about it andLooking back at it, I’m not even sure why I read this book. The Passage left so little impression on me that I remembered almost nothing about it and could barely muster the energy to look on-line for a summary of it. So why read another 500 pages of that story? Maybe it was the hype? Or because I’m such a sucker for post-apocalyptic stories?

Actually, I now think that these books are like one of those B-level restaurants that you end up eating at all the time, but you don’t really know why. The food is just OK and the price is right and it’s close to your house and you never got a nasty case of the screaming greasies after eating there, but it’s not a place you’d recommend to any of your friends or pass up a decent frozen pizza for a meal there. Much like one of these middle-of-the-road restaurants provides gut pack for your belly, these books are gut pack for the mind. It’s not terrible, but you can think of a lot better options.

Which is weird because it’s a horror novel going for epic scale with no shortage of blood and monsters so you’d think it’d elicit some kind of response. Instead it just kept reminding me of other things I liked more. A post-apocalyptic world with a huge battle between good and evil is more satisfying in The Stand. Playing with the idea of different strains of vampires is done much better in Scott Snyder’s American Vampire comics. The crazy vampire lady concept was a lot more fun when Drusilla did it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Blade wielding Alicia certainly resembles Alice in the Resident Evil films. (You know a book isn’t entertaining you much when you start daydreaming about watching Resident Evil movies instead of reading it.)

I don’t know if it’s because of his background writing the Serious Lit-A-Chur (I haven’t read any of his other books.), but it felt like Cronin glumly slogged through this and that his pulse rate never jumped once. If you’re going to write a post-apocalyptic novel, there needs to be a certain amount of inappropriate excitement involved. I read something by Stephen King once where he talked about taking grim satisfaction in destroying the world in The Stand and when you read that, you can feel the dark glee he took in just smashing the whole thing. Cronin just doesn't seem like he’s that into it. Why bother writing the end of civilization if you’re not gonna have some fun with it?

Part of the problem may be that Cronin skips over that phase for the most part. He showed us the beginnings of the vampire plague but then jumped forward by decades so we never really got to see things come undone. I think it’s telling that the part I enjoyed the most in both books was the glimpse we got of the world going belly up during the outbreak with Kittridge, Danny the autistic bus driver and all the others. That’s the one part of the book where the characters seemed distinctly different from one another and where there’s some real passion flowing. Even though I found the character of Lila extremely annoying because a pregnant surgeon who avoids dealing the with the on-going apocalypse by going crazy town banana pants and acting like nothing is wrong should be the first one to get her blood drained, at least she evoked some kind of reaction from me. Whereas the other characters in the book were essentially a big shrug.

This book is such a yawn that I had a hard time deciding on whether to give it 2 or 3 stars. I finally decided that giving it 2 stars would actually mean that I cared enough to downgrade it. But I don’t. This thing is the epitome of average so 3 stars it is....more

There’s essentially two stories told in this volume. The secret group of vampire hunters called VaWhat could make World War 2 even bloodier? Vampires!

There’s essentially two stories told in this volume. The secret group of vampire hunters called Vassels of the Morning Star recruit aging human Henry to leave his vampire wife Pearl to try and root out a nest of bloodsuckers on the island of Taipan as the US tries to take it from the Japanese. Skinner Sweet shows up with his own agenda and as always the brutal vampire creates chaos and bloodshed wherever he goes.

In the second story, the Vassels send their agents Cash McCogan and Felicia Book to Europe on a secret mission to see if a Nazi scienctist has developed a cure for vampirism. And in a one off story, Skinner Sweet takes in a wild west show where he creates more mischief after coming across some old friends.

The series is just getting better and better as it goes. It’s now obvious that Snyder has a pretty well mapped out plot going on, and it’s getting more intriguing as the takes the characters deeper into the 20th century. We also get some more explanation and background as to the different vampire species.

To most people a lullaby is a soothing song meant to help coax a child to sleep, but in Chuck Palahniuk’s hands it becomes a death spell that can killTo most people a lullaby is a soothing song meant to help coax a child to sleep, but in Chuck Palahniuk’s hands it becomes a death spell that can kill anyone. Of course, that’s not twisted enough for Chuckie P. so he had to throw in some witchcraft, necrophilia and dead babies to really make it a party.

Carl Streator is a newspaper reporter working on a feature about infant crib deaths, and he has his own tragic experience in that area. When Streator sees a book containing an African chant at several homes where the baby died, he does more digging and discovers that it‘s a culling song that can be used to kill just by thinking it. Since Carl has a few anger problems, this leads to a lot of deaths of people who annoy him as he tries to get control.

Streator seeks help from Helen Hoover Boyle a realtor who specializes in flipping haunted houses and who also knows the culling song. He convinces her that they should take a road trip to destroy all the copies of the book, but her secretary Mona, a witch wannabe, and her animal rights activist and all around asshole of a boyfriend Oyster end up coming along for the ride. Mona also convinces them that the culling song probably came from a powerful spell book they should try to locate.

The culling song is a nifty hook for the story and Streator’s tendency to off anyone who’s pissing him off provides some dark hilarity. My biggest problem with this one is that Streator is a complete moron. He instantly realizes the chaos that would occur if anyone else figured out the culling song and how to use it, but then he promptly blabs about it to Mona and a disgusting EMT with a penchant for corpse sex. He often can't control himself with the culling song and kills people for offenses like having their TV’s too loud or bumping into him on the street, yet somehow he manages not to whack the ultra-annoying Oyster.

Then he invites Oyster and Mona on the road to destroy the book. So you’re trying to destroy a dangerous spell that can kill people and you bring along a guy who spends every waking moment telling you all the crimes people have committed against animals. Guess how well that turns out?...more

About a hundred people died while building Hoover Dam. After reading this, I have to assume that all of those deaths were due to vampire attacks.

PickiAbout a hundred people died while building Hoover Dam. After reading this, I have to assume that all of those deaths were due to vampire attacks.

Picking up several years after the last volume, it’s 1935 and a formerly sleepy Nevada town called Las Vegas is booming because of the thousands of workers in the area constructing Hoover Dam. Police chief Cash Morgan doesn’t like what the gambling and prostitution are doing to his city, but there isn’t much he can do to stop it. When a businessman connected to the dam is sucked dry of all of his blood, Cash finds a link to a pimp called Jim Smoke that he blames for the murder of his father, but Smoke is actually the brutal vampire named Skinner Sweet.

Once again Snyder has delivered a fun and nasty twist on the vampire genre with American history as it’s backdrop. One of the ideas I really like in this series is that there are different species of vamps with varying strengths and weaknesses. Skinner Sweet was the first of a new breed who is at war with the older vampire factions as well as the humans hunting them, but Skinner is not some sparkly emo type or some brooding angst filled anti-hero. Skinner is a monster who is devious, brutal and utterly without remorse.

We learn the fates of others who had the bad luck to cross his path in the last volume as well as watching what happens to Cash and others when they get mixed up in vampire feuds. ...more

In my review of Vol. 7 - Twilight, I complained that Whedon and his stable of writers had goIt’s about time that Joss Whedon started listening to me.

In my review of Vol. 7 - Twilight, I complained that Whedon and his stable of writers had gotten so excited about being free of the limitations of a television show that they had made the scale too epic and the big sci-fi concepts too wacky and lost the emotional core that always made the show so good. In the afterwards of this collection, Whedon admits that he got carried away and that this finale of the so-called Season 8 was the start of a more down-to-Earth Buffy that we’ll see in Season 9.

Validation!!

Hey, Joss, if you want me to look over anything you’re doing on The Avengers, just let me know. I’d be happy to help you out. For a reasonable fee.

This collection does a decent job of trying to settle all the wild ass craziness that the previous volumes had built up to with Buffy and her crew engaging in a massive battle with dimension hopping demons and the US Army to decide the fate of all magic on Earth. Or something. There’s still a whole bunch of metaphysical mumbo jumbo that’s confusing as hell, but by the end, it does appear that Whedon is trying to get back to the Buffy basics.

In fact, despite my previous bitching on this very subject, I think the Joss-man may have hit that reset button just a little too hard. While I was all for scaling back some of the bat shit craziness in the comics, it seems like there was a bit too much baby in that bathwater. It definitely felt like Buffy had taken several steps back towards the Sunnydale days by the end of this. Fingers crossed that the next phase manages to advance the overall story without going too far over the top but doesn’t try to revert back to an earlier incarnation of the show. ...more

When the zombie apocalypse comes there’ll be a lot of inconveniences. The breakdown of society, lack of electrical power, no hot showers and undead caWhen the zombie apocalypse comes there’ll be a lot of inconveniences. The breakdown of society, lack of electrical power, no hot showers and undead cannibals trying to eat your brains will definitely suck, but I always figured that the trade-off was that at least there’d be no more paying bills, standing in line at the DMV or having to tolerate corporate buzz words and slogans.

But in Zone One not only are there plenty of zombies, there’s still silly bureaucratic rules and paperwork as well as a government more concerned with public perception than in actually accomplishing anything. It’s like the worst of everything.

Mark Spitz (a nickname explained late in the book) was completely average and his only real talent seemed to be a knack for coasting through life with a minimum of fuss. Once the zombie apocalypse comes, Mark Spitz’s ability to get by served him well and allowed him to escape the initial zombie outbreak and survive in the aftermath.

Now Mark Spitz is one of the sweepers assigned to clean-up Manhattan. The surviving government in Buffalo sent the Marines through to kill the most vicious zombies, but there’s a remaining element of ‘stragglers’, about 1% of the undead who just return to old homes or jobs and seem vapor locked there as they mindlessly watch blank tv screens or punch buttons on dead copy machines.

Buffalo has rebranded the refugee camps of survivors with names like Happy Acres and has a plan to clear and repopulate New York. As Mark Spitz spends his days popping and dropping stragglers, he reflects on his aimless days before the zombie outbreak on Last Night and his time as a wandering refugee before he was found by Buffalo’s army.

This is the first book I’m aware of that tries to do the zombie genre as Very Serious Literature. (No, Pride & Prejudice & Zombies doesn’t count.) Overall, it succeeds remarkably well. Mark Spitz’s reflections on pre and post zombie life are intriguing and his melancholy drifting through his days cleaning out Manhattan have the feel of a guy eulogizing an entire world. My only complaint is that the memories and current events sometimes get so tangled that it made it a tad confusing at times to figure out where we were in the story of Mark Spitz.

On the zombie front, Whitehead delivers some tense and horrific action in the encounters with the undead. (In fact, Whitehead delivered more zombie fightin’ action and detailed descriptions of the walking dead in 240 pages than Mira Grant has in her two 500+ page horror genre novels. Read this and take notes, Mira.)

I especially liked the idea that the government in Buffalo has started doing asinine things like issuing orders against the sweepers doing more property damage than necessary while clearing buildings and prohibiting looting while also issuing pamphlets about the dangers of zombie post-traumatic stress disorder. It seems kind of insane at first but after thinking about it a while, I came to the conclusion that it was highly likely that the political image consultants and corporate marketing whizzes would probably, like cockroaches, be the ones to survive a zombie apocalypse and promptly start trying to rebuild the world the only way they know how, conning people into doing shit even if it flies in the face of common sense.

Great book that elevates the entire horror genre. It doesn’t take the #1 spot from my favorite zombie novel, World War Z but I think it’s got a lock on the #2 spot for now....more

“I hold to no God,” Roland said. “I hold to the Tower and won’t pray to th“Would’ee speak a word of prayer first, Roland? To whatever God thee holds?”

“I hold to no God,” Roland said. “I hold to the Tower and won’t pray to that.”

Damn, I love that line. It so perfectly sums up Roland, his quest to find the Tower, what it’s cost him, and how he knows he isn’t done paying yet.

For years, it seemed like Dark Tower had been walking in aimless circles during the long breaks between the third, fourth and fifth books. We knew that King had finished the final three volumes after losing a game of chicken with a minivan, and he’d gotten the story back up and striding briskly in the right direction with Wolves of the Calla including ending that one on a pretty wicked cliffhanger.

Still the pace of this one took me by surprise. It’s like King suddenly pulled out a whip and started cracking it over the heads of the DT fans while screaming, “Run, you bastards! You gotta run if you want to find out what happens! BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HA!”

And he didn’t even let us stretch properly first. That’s how you end up with a pulled hamstring.

Susannah’s demon pregnancy led to her being taken over by the personality of Mia, and she fled Mid-World to New York in 1999 via the Doorway Cave. As Susannah wrestles Mia for control of her own body and learns more about the Crimson King, Roland and Eddie plan to follow and save her while Jake and Callahan also come to our world to protect the rose growing in a vacant lot which is actually a critical incarnation of the Tower. But when things go off the rails, all of the gunslingers will have to scramble to try and save not only Susannah, but their own lives.

This is essentially a set-up book that preps the way for the conclusion in the last one, and it doesn’t resolve a helluva lot on it’s own. Still, I like it for its breakneck pace and the sense of urgency that King worked into this one. The breaking of a beam in Mid-World before the action moves to New York was a great reminder of the stakes here. The lines of force holding reality together are being subverted by the Crimson King’s breakers, and the so-called beamquake when one snaps is a stark warning to Roland and company that they are quickly running out of time.

Unfortunately, while the Susannah pregnancy story makes for a pretty good hook to drive the urgency of the story, it ends up being kind of unsatisfying overall once you know how the whole series ends. Plus, the conflict between Susannah and Mia reminded me a lot of a very similar plot that King had done in Dreamcatcher shortly before this book was released. So it didn’t feel all that fresh.

Overall, there’s a feel of desperation in this one that takes us nicely into the final volume, and the cliffhangers here had me on the edge of my seat the first time I read this.

There’s one controversial piece to this part of the DT story. (view spoiler)[ A lot of fans don’t like that King wrote himself into this, and I was hesitant about it myself the first time through this when I wasn’t sure how the story would end. At the end of Wolves of the Calla and into this one, I was worried that it was going to turn out that the Dark Tower was Stephen King himself and that its fall was his ‘death’ due to the minivan accident.

Knowing the ending now and rereading this, writing himself into the story doesn’t bother me as much. If he’d portrayed himself as some kind of all-knowing creator, I might have hated it too, but he didn‘t. He’s a pawn with a role to play. A role he kind of screws up by not getting off his ass and finishing this series sooner.

I like that the power behind the Tower is the force of creation itself, and that the Crimson King and the other baddies are agents of chaos and destruction. I think of it as the Tower was saving itself by creating a story of a hero on a quest, and it needed someone to write that story. Enter King, who actually made himself look kind of crappy in the process.

It’s not my favorite part of the series, but it didn’t ruin it for me either. (hide spoiler)]["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>...more

When I reviewed the previous book, Feed, I noted that that there were very few zombie attacks in it despite it being called a zombie book. Compared toWhen I reviewed the previous book, Feed, I noted that that there were very few zombie attacks in it despite it being called a zombie book. Compared to Deadline, that one now looks like The Night of the Living Dead.

There’s an opening chapter here with our intrepid heroes escaping a pack of zombies that ends on page 18. We don’t get another actual zombie encounter until over 500 PAGES later. Not that there aren’t zombies around. The characters flee a major city right before it gets firebombed due a zombie outbreak. There’s another chapter where two of them are being chased through the halls of a government building, but they only HEAR the zombie behind them, never see it. So our first person narrator does not actually lay eyes on a zombie after the first chapter until almost the end of this overstuffed book.

If this was some kind of more serious suspense/character based-type horror novel based on the impact of a mostly unseen threat, this could be an interesting take on the genre. But it’s not. It is most definitely meant to be a fast paced action horror conspiracy thriller with everyone talking repeatedly about how dangerous it is to go outside because of all the zombies, and there’s all kinds of scenes about prepping weapons and talk, talk, talk, goddamn talk about the zombie threat. So spending over 500 pages in between incidents of where the narrator actually draws a gun and shoots at a zombie is freakin' ridiculous.

Mira Grant came up with a pretty nice twist on the zombie genre where a general outbreak was caused by a virus that now lies dormant in everyone’s system. Get bit by a zombie and you turn into one. Die from a heat attack and the virus goes active, and you still turn undead cannibal. 30 years after the initial outbreak, there is a stalemate between the living and the dead. Large areas are considered too dangerous to enter, and most people spend all their time living and working in fortified buildings with advanced technology used to screen and lock off the infected. A new breed of Internet journalists are the main characters who have gotten involved in a larger conspiracy that capitalizes on a world full of people afraid to go outside.

The parts of Feed and Deadline where Grant lays out how this fearful society functions are some of the most inventive and interesting parts of the story. Unfortunately, it’s become clear that Grant is far more interested in coming up with and describing all these changes and future security measures than she is in zombie fightin’ action. Despite the very few scenes of actual zombie encounters, we are repeatedly told how dangerous the outside world is and walked through the testing and security procedures that everyone goes through.

While she’ll go into detail over and over again describing the blood screening units and how they work, when we finally get a zombie attack, they’re just ‘zombies’. No descriptions of age or gender or how they’re clothed or how they‘ve decayed. I realize that it’d be overkill to try and describe every member of a zombie mob, but the fact that Grant doesn’t give a single detailed description shows where she ranks the zombie importance to this story.

In fact, I think Grant may have been better served if these books were about just a society cowering from a dangerous virus because that’s obviously what she has the most interest in. The only reason zombies are in these books is because it gives an easy excuse for everyone to be heavily armed and something to run from when she finally amps up the action.

There are some other big flaws with these books. Grant has a bad case of repeatshititis and we’re told variations on the same stuff over and over and over and over and over and over.. You get the picture. For example, our narrator loves coffee but has to drink Coke for reasons I won’t get into. We are told on every other page how he craves coffee but has to be content with drinking ‘syrupy sweet’ Coke. And someone is always handing him a Coke. I got it the first dozen times, Mira. Please put down that two-liter bottle you've been bashing me on the head with.

The unraveling of the conspiracy storyline is pretty stupid, too. Our intrepid heroes get secret medical research dropped on them. Their first reaction is to make the dangerous journey to a government facility to ask them about it. It doesn’t go well. They run and hide. Later they get yet more secret medical research dropped on them. And their plan is… to go to another government facility and demand answers. Yeah, guess how that goes.

The biggest frustration in this book comes from Feed so be aware that I’m giving up the ending of that book in this (view spoiler)[ Georgia Mason was the narrator of the first book and one of the more surprising things is that she was killed at the end after getting deliberately infected with the zombie virus. Her adopted brother Shaun had to shoot her. Shaun is our narrator for this book, and he is a complete douche bag. He is constantly having conversations with his dead sister because he ‘hears’ her in his head, and he freely admits this to everyone. Yet if anyone (including his blogging employees) ask him about this, or bring up Georgia in almost any way, Shaun’s immediate reaction is to punch them in the face. He makes no apologies and almost brags about it.

Also, his immediate response to bad news is to punch walls repeatedly. Which no one is allowed to question him about, either. Yet we’re supposed to believe that these journalist bloggers are so loyal to Shaun that they continue to overlook that he’s violent and dangerously unhinged, and they go out of their way to avoid upsetting him. This is all supposed to illustrate how devastated Shaun is by Georgia’s death, but it just makes him seem like a self-absorbed abusive fuck. “It’s my own fault he blacked my eye, Officer. I asked him something he didn’t like, but please don’t arrest him. He‘s really a good guy. He‘s just having some problems right now.” (hide spoiler)].

Despite all of this bitching, I still almost gave this book 3 stars. (It was a twist at the end that I saw coming from the early chapters that finally dropped this to a 2 star rating for me.) Grant has a very readable style and came up with some interesting ideas for the zombie genre. This is being marketed as a trilogy, and I’ll probably end up reading the final one when it comes out. But looking ahead, I see that it’s also over 500 pages, and I’ve got a sinking feeling I know what most of it’ll be about. Repeated blood screenings and lots and lots of talking about zombies, but precious few actual zombie encounters is my guess. It’s too bad because a little less repetition and a lot more blood splatter from some head shots could have made these some of my favorite zombie books.["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>...more

Nowadays, it seems like every horror movie is either a remake, a sequel or the kind of vile torture porn that makes you want to puke in your bag of poNowadays, it seems like every horror movie is either a remake, a sequel or the kind of vile torture porn that makes you want to puke in your bag of popcorn. Filming one of these flicks requires tens of millions of dollars for a platoon of pretty actors, gallons of fake blood, special effects and a marketing campaign. Oddly, they don’t seem to spend any money on scripts for these things.

But Alfred Hitchcock only needed about nine grand to buy the rights to this book. Then it only took a blonde, a shower, and a butcher knife to create one of the defining scenes in horror history. There might be a lesson in that story somewhere, Hollywood.

Legend has it that Hitchcock had all the available copies of the book bought up after he obtained the rights so that he could keep the story secret for his version. If that isn’t true, it should be. I’ve often wished that I had a way to temporarily blank out my memory of certain stories so that I could read or see them for the first time all over again and be completely surprised. Unfortunately, alcoholic blackouts are extremely unreliable at this so I just have to try and imagine what it would have been like to read this book before the story became a classic. I bet it was a complete mind fuck for those poor bastards who did read it back in 1959.

It holds up remarkably well despite knowing the story and it being over 50 years old. Shifting narration to the inner dialogues of different characters was very effective, especially with Norman himself. My only real complaint is that I wished it would have been the sister Lila and not Mary who took the infamous shower because Lila is a shrill nagging harpy that annoyed the hell out of me.

This book is about mobs of mindless zombies influencing American politics. Surprisingly, it’s not about the Tea Party.

In the year 2014, genetically enThis book is about mobs of mindless zombies influencing American politics. Surprisingly, it’s not about the Tea Party.

In the year 2014, genetically engineered viruses mutated and caused the dead to come back to life and start munching on people like senior citizens at a casino buffet. Over 20% of the world’s population got gobbled up like popcorn shrimp, and in 2040 the threat of the still existing virus and zombies has changed life forever. Since the virus is present in everyone’s system, when anyone dies, whether it’s from zombie bite or natural causes, they will turn into one of the undead cannibals. Large gatherings of people rarely occur, everyone’s homes and cars are fortresses equipped with high tech screening equipment and huge areas (like Alaska) have been given up as zones too hazardous to enter without special permits and training.

Georgia Mason and her brother Shaun are part of the new generation of bloggers. Georgia is a straight Newsie, reporting only the facts and trying to get past the spin. Shaun is kind of like one of the guys on Jackass who goes out to taunt the undead while recording and posting his exploits. When they are offered a chance to follow the presidential campaign of a senator it’s a chance for them to move to the head of the pack of web journalists. However, when the senator’s caravan is the victim of a zombie attack the Masons get caught up in a dangerous conspiracy.

This was a pretty unique zombie tale with some very good ideas in it. The explanation for the way the virus works is one of the more thought out causes of the undead I’ve read. It also shows a lot of thought of what the media of the future is going to look like with competing websites featuring a mix of news/opinion/death defying features and even fiction. Mira Grant has created a tale of how the fear of external threats can become an everyday part of society that’s ripe for exploitation.

However, at 600 pages it feels a bit overstuffed. We’re repeatedly walked through the blood screenings and other security measures that are part of society to the point of boredom. Georgia has an eye condition due to the zombie virus present in her system, and there are about 1236 instances of security guys demanding that she take off her prescription sunglasses and the problems it causes. And for a book where the threat of zombies is ever present, there are very few actual zombie attacks in it.

I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the Mason’s role in this story. They’re supposed to be young journalists on their way up, but somehow Georgia‘s reports quickly become must reading on the web as she instantly became an expert on presidential politics her first time covering a campaign. Also, Georgia and Shaun are constantly looking down their noses at everyone around them for being ‘amatuers’ when it comes to dealing with zombies because (as we are repeatedly reminded) they are licensed and trained journalists with extensive time in the field. So these young people are apparently the only ones with the smarts, experience and ability to see what’s going on and everyone, including a US senator, defers to them to an unbelievable degree.

Still, this was fun mash-up of a zombie story and a political/ conspiracy thriller with some interesting predictions about where the new media will take us. I’ll probably check out the next one in the series, but I hope there’s more brain munching and fewer blood tests in the second book....more

When civilization finally does collapse and I’m left in the post-apocalyptic wasteland scrounging for weapons, books and tacos, I’m going to be one ofWhen civilization finally does collapse and I’m left in the post-apocalyptic wasteland scrounging for weapons, books and tacos, I’m going to be one of those loner types like Mad Max. No joining up with up roving marauders or settling into some fortified compound for me. That’s because The Walking Dead has taught me one sure rule: Being surrounded by decaying cannibal zombies in the ruins of society may suck but normal people suck even more.

Rick and his crew have found a small community that has managed to secure themselves from the zombie hordes and live in a somewhat normal fashion. However, their time battling the undead and various human scum has taken a heavy toll on Rick. He’s had to do so many terrible things to survive that he’s fallen into the trap of thinking that he’s the only one capable of making the hard choices needed. So his uneasiness and lack of trust in their new community pushes him to steal and hide weapons as well as deal with an abusive husband on his own terms. Is Rick right to mistrust the people in their new home? Or has he become a paranoid nutjob unable to live among people?

Another solid entry in the The Walking Dead series, and it got me geeked up for the return of the AMC show later this year. But while it’s an intriguing new twist on the series, this one had the feel up of being mostly set-up for later stories....more

Treasure of the Rubbermaids 4: The Sound of the Men Working on the Chain Gang

The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack oTreasure of the Rubbermaids 4: The Sound of the Men Working on the Chain Gang

The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers previously stored and forgotten at my parent’s house and untouched for almost 20 years. Thanks to my father dumping them back on me, I now spend my spare time unearthing lost treasures from their plastic depths.

Even though it’s been over twenty years, I remember why I bought this book. Back in the pre-Internet days, if you didn’t live in a large city, books didn’t get a lot of media attention. So when the nearest mid-sized city paper had an article about an author, and his book was described as new gory crime/horror series featuring an outlandish villain that had been endorsed by the likes of Stephen King and Harlan Ellison, it got my attention. If I remember correctly, the author was from Missouri and it was getting treated as a local-boy-makes-good story and somebody was smart enough to stock his book at the local Waldens so I got a copy fairly easily.

Unfortunately, Rex Miller was ahead of his time. He created a character so gruesome and despicable that he would have fit in better in the torture porn that passes for horror these days. I don’t think the series ever really broke big the way it seemed like it would. I know I never read any of his other books because even my late teen self had better taste than that.

There’s a cop named Jack Eichord who is part of some kind of national task force that’s not well explained who is supposed to be a serial killer expert, and he’s come to Chicago to help find a lunatic who is cutting the hearts out of people. He meets the beautiful widow of one of the victims who was killed a few years before, and they instantly fall deeply in love. So he hangs around her and her kid. That’s about it. For being a cop, he seemingly does very little police work.

That’s because the main part of this book is about a 6’7”, 450 lb. psychopath. (I think the author read Daredevil comics and based this guy on the Kingpin.) The psycho was called Chaingang when he was a one man killing machine in Vietnam because he likes to use a hunk of chain to crush the skulls of his targets when he’s feeling frisky. Not only is Chaingang completely shithouse rat crazy, he’s also brilliant. Because all serial killers in fiction are brilliant. Oh, and he also has a low level of precognition that warns him of danger.

If Miller would have stopped there, he might have been on to something. The idea of an oversized deranged murderer roaming around could have been a new twist on the serial killer, but he had to keep adding things to Chaingang to the point of where a suspension of disbelief is impossible.

We’re supposed to think that a jumbo sized guy who can’t go fifteen minutes without raping and killing someone as he lugs around a giant duffel bag full of weapons and gear somehow manages to bounce around without getting noticed by the cops for years. Even with his psychic warning system, that seems kind of unlikely.

And not only is Chaingang brilliant, we’re told that he’s a master con man who can talk a beautiful woman into a vehicle by pretending to be a movie producer. Seriously, what woman would look at a 450 lb. guy in a piece of shit vehicle filled with fast foot wrappers and say, “Sure, I’ll get in your car!”

We’re also supposed to believe that Chaingang is a master thief. Because who would notice a giant covered in blood and food stains walking around stealing shit?

So while Chaingang could have made an interesting and unique villain, Miller pushed the concept way past the point of absurdity. Even for a schlock horror novel, there’s almost no logic to the plot. At one point, the Chicago police want to pin Chaingang’s murders on a copycat killer, and even though Eichord knows that the evidence won’t pass the simplest forensic tests, he agrees to be their mouthpiece for the media to sell the story for no good reason even though he thinks the idea is stupid. Plus, the love story between Eichord and the widow is unbelievable and completely pointless except to add sex scenes to the story.

Overall, there was a halfway decent potential villain lurking in this book, but Miller spent too much time adding new unbelievable twists to his creation to come up with any plot for him or another interesting character in the whole book...more

The fine folks who run Goodreads can point to this review with their sponsors as proof that their ads actually work because I got this book after seeiThe fine folks who run Goodreads can point to this review with their sponsors as proof that their ads actually work because I got this book after seeing it several times here on the site. Granted, I got it from the library so I didn’t actually spend any money on it, but the fact that I sought it out and read it after seeing it on here has to count for something, right? (Oh, and I will never watch that Gnomeo & Juliet movie because the damn thing expanded all over my screen if my cursor got within a half-mile of it so that’s one ad that actually made me hate the thing it was selling.)

Anyhow, for once Internet advertising was useful because I read an entertaining book that I probably wouldn’t have checked out otherwise. Arlen Wagner is a World War I veteran trying to get by during the Great Depression by working for one of the government coservation projects. He befriends a young man named Paul Brickhill who has a knack for construction and engineering, and when their current job ends, Paul talks Arlen into going down to the Florida Keys with him to work on a bridge project.

However, Arlen has a creepy gift. He can tell when people are about to die because he begins seeing them as skeletal figures with smoke in their eyes. On the train to Florida, Arlen begins seeing that everyone on the train is going to die in the near future. He talks Paul into getting off the train with him, but the other men think he’s crazy and continue on towards disaster.

Arlen and Paul catch a ride with a slick stranger who makes a stop at an isolated fishing resort run by the beautiful but secretive Rebecca Cady. Before they realize what they’ve gotten into, Arlen and Paul have gotten on the bad sides of a corrupt local judge and sheriff, and then caught in a hurricane. Arlen just wants to get out of the county, but before it’s all over, he‘ll be seeing a lot more people with skeleton features and smokey eyes.

I hadn’t read Koryta before, but I’ll checking out more of his work. Here, he’s created a period crime piece with a spooky supernatural twist. The haunted Arlen and the gifted but naïve Paul are a couple of great characters, and the Florida beaches and swamps make a nice backdrop for the drama. This is quality fast-paced creepy story telling....more

I would hate to have to pay Stark’s clothing and laundry bills because this guy can’t go ten minutes without getting his duds ripped to shreds or coveI would hate to have to pay Stark’s clothing and laundry bills because this guy can’t go ten minutes without getting his duds ripped to shreds or covered in the gore of various monsters and his own blood.

This series is making me a little nuts. In the first book, Sandman Slim, I thought the first half was a waste of a good idea and that the main character Stark came across as a whining impulsive punk who got regularly beaten like a rented mule rather than the super-tough anti-hero hitman from Hell he was supposed to be. Then the second half of the book ramped up the action and Stark finally seemed like the scary bad ass he’d been claiming to be.

I hoped that momentum would carry over into this book. But Kill the Dead started off badly for me. Once again, Stark was being an asshole just for the sake of being an asshole and he managed to get his ass kicked yet again and another leather jacket ruined in the first chapter.

However, it soon kicked into high gear and again seemed like Kadrey was gearing up for a big finish, but this time the book devolved into a confusing mess more concerned with setting up the next book than delivering a satisfying story here.

The plot picks up a few months after the events of Sandman Slim. Stark is in a bit of a funk. His roommate is a magically animated decapitated head with a taste for beer and burritos. (Don’t ask.) To make ends meet, he’s doing bounty hunter gigs on various demons and monsters for the Golden Vigil, a hybrid department of angels and Homeland Security.

Now a celebrity in L.A.’s supernatural underground due to his breakout from Hell, Stark is still on good terms with the devil himself. When Lucifer comes to Hollywood to supervise a bio-pic being done on him, he hires Stark to be his bodyguard. Fairly quickly, Stark is fighting off a team of kidnappers and hordes of zombies, but at least he’s met a beautiful Czechoslovakian porn star.

The action and overall storyline are good for most of the book and Kadrey delivers some funny lines regularly, but it’s also kind of confusing. I read Sandman Slim over a year ago , and there’s little recapping done to refresh the memory so there was more than once where I was scratching my head and wondering, “Who the hell is that person again? What’s a Jade? Wait, is she an angel?” Someone who hadn’t read the first book would be pretty much clueless.

There’s also still some severe logic gaps. Stark needs money, yet he has the ability to travel to any point on earth or several other universes. So why wouldn’t he just visit a bank vault or two? He certainly doesn’t have any moral objections to stealing since he’s constantly swiping sports car rather than using his traveling trick.

Much like the last book, I thought it was kind of fun and clever in spots, but leaned a little too heavily on the whole Stark-is-a-miserable-asshole schtick. I’m once again left hoping that the next one is an improvement, but I’m still interested enough to keep reading the series....more

In this book, the corpses of the recently dead in Sweden become reanimated which leads to numerous legal, political and ethical issues when it comes tIn this book, the corpses of the recently dead in Sweden become reanimated which leads to numerous legal, political and ethical issues when it comes to dealing with folks who aren’t technically alive. What kind of dilemmas would this cause society? For example, if this actually happened in Stockholm, I’m sure that that the publishers of Stieg Larsson’s books would chain his zombified ass to a desk and let him bang on the keys of a laptop until they got enough to put out a new bestseller, The Girl Who sJFnfJGgJOJ=I30&*(&U389kkl8.

Back to this book. Sweden is experiencing a weird electrical surge that leaves people unable to turn off or unplug their electronics, and it also seems to be giving everyone some wicked headaches. After a sudden intensification of the electrical field, it’s gone but in it’s wake, the recently dead in the area have awakened.

However, these aren’t the usual flesh eating zombies. These are just mindless and disgusting corpses that usually try to return to their old homes. The Swedish government tries to deal with 2000 of the walking dead as their loved ones demand answers and access to them. Is this a virus? Something supernatural? A sign of the apocalypse? No one knows, and the status of the zombies’ civil rights is up in the air since no law has ever addressed the undead before. As tensions rise, it becomes clear that the zombies are causing some kind of telepathy in the living people as well as becoming mirrors to the emotional state of those closest to them.

As both a fan of the zombie genre and Lindquvist’s previous genre-bending vampire novel Let the Right One In, I had high hopes for this one, but I was supremely disappointed. Part of my problem with this has to do with my own preferences in zombie story telling. I like my zombies to be horrific cannibals who munch brains and destroy society while survivors struggle against them and each other. Whenever anyone starts to add in telepathy or tries to make the zombies part of some larger supernatural force, my eyes glaze over. And if you’ve got a pack of zombies that are just sad remnants of the people who died that don’t even try to gnaw on the nearest person, then I’m just not that interested. (Yes, I realize I have issues.)

It seems like Lindquvist couldn’t decide if he was writing a horror novel about the nature of death, or kind of an absurd take on the idea of how society would react if people did come back from the dead. Frankly, S.G. Browne’s black comedy Breathers already dealt with a lot of these ideas, and Browne did it better. The focus keeps wandering as Lindqvist tries to add in some horror elements late in the game, and the ending was a mess.

It’s still well-written and Lindquvist is a writer who realizes that people are the ultimate monsters, but I would have liked to have seen what kind of twist he could have put on the classic zombie genre of the undead destroying society rather than society trying to figure out how to deal with some mostly harmless walking corpses....more

When I read and reviewed The Strain, I took some easy potshots at Twilight and credited Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan with trying to rescue vampiWhen I read and reviewed The Strain, I took some easy potshots at Twilight and credited Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan with trying to rescue vampires from the clutches of teenage girls and turn them into monsters again. However, the book didn’t wow me, and I was hoping that the next one would be an improvement. After reading The Fall, I’m even less wowed and realize that a book can be much better than Twilight and still be very ‘meh’.

So you’ve got a brand of vampires that are part virus/part parasitic blood worms with a master vamp who has a plan to bring out about a bloodsucking apocalypse. The Master has been working with this evil old rich bastard who is kind of a hybrid of Dick Cheney and Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. Together, they’ve got a chokehold on the government and media as well as a rapidly growing army of bloodsuckers.

And in this corner, you’ve got the standard pack of adventure horror good guys ready to do battle. There’s the heroic doctor with a failed marriage and a drinking problem to overcome along with his pretty co-worker. I know you’ll be shocked when I tell you that they’re a bit attracted to each other. The doctor also has a teen-age son who is such a ball of fire that all he wants to do is listen to his iPod while the vampires are munching people outside. There’s the standard Van Helsing-type old man who has been hunting vamps for years and instructs the others. You've also got a Hispanic street hustler who forges a gang alliance based on vampire killing. Throw in a pest control expert and a former Mexican wrestling star, and you’ve got your motley crew ready to do battle with the undead.

I’ve liked several of Del Toro’s movies, and I was impressed with Hogan’s work in The Town. But despite a large scale story about a vampire apocalypse going on with tons of action, the whole thing seems curiously listless to me. It just never comes alive and gets me wrapped up in the story.

Part of the problem is that the whole thing feels like a collection of things I’ve seen before. Del Toro has felt free to swipe whole sections of his own movies like Mimic and Blade II with the descriptions of underground New York and the nature of the vampires. Plus, Joss Whedon used the Master concept and name for his main vampire villain on the first season of Buffy. And having one of the primary villains be a rich old guy selling out humanity for immortality doesn’t seem particularly fresh either.

Sadly, instead of trying to build up any true horror by creating characters you care about and then having bad things happen to them, the book just throws vamp attack after vamp attack at these cardboard cutout heroes and then tries to milk a little sentiment with a few dead-wives-turned-bloodsuckers sprinkled in. I almost think that Del Toro just grabbed some old storyboards from some of his movies, threw them to Chuck Hogan and said, “Just write that up. We’ll make a fortune.!”

It’s not a terrible book. I’ve certainly read far worse. But I was expecting a lot more from two talented guys and so far it seems like they’ve just been going through the motions. ...more

Good afternoon. This is Wolf Blitzer from CNN’s The Situation Room, the program that tries to make viewers think that you’re seeing the busy hub of teGood afternoon. This is Wolf Blitzer from CNN’s The Situation Room, the program that tries to make viewers think that you’re seeing the busy hub of television journalism instead of admitting that despite our high-tech looking set and satellite feeds, you’d probably learn more about what’s actually going on in the world by looking out your window.

We turn our focus now to growing rumors that the U.S. Army is conducting secret medical experiments on American soil. The bizarre claims seem like something out of a Stephen King novel, yet despite repeated denials by the Defense Department, the stories continue to grow and documents posted on WikiLeaks seem to support some of this.

Is this just an urban myth gaining popularity thanks to the internet, or is there something to these rumors? Joining me now via satellite from his office is Major John Smith, a spokesman from the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Major, thanks for joining us.

MJS: Of course. Frankly, Wolf, I’m surprised we even have to bother discussing this. It’s obviously the work of internet hoaxsters.

WB: But what about the documentation that’s leaked out?

MJS: They are clearly forgeries. Have you read this stuff? Secret bases on U.S. soil? Convicted felons recruited and used for guinea pigs for drug trials to extend human life? Vampire-like creatures that have some kind of telepathic connection and cause bad dreams? I think someone just posted an old X-Files script. I find it sad that Americans are wasting time on this nonsense.

WB: It does seem outlandish, but let’s talk a few specifics. The documents mention a Project Noah that the USAMRIID is running. And there are line items in the USAMRIID budget for a Project Noah for a significant amount of money.

MJS: I can confirm that there is a Project Noah, and while it’s top-secret, I have been authorized to disclose that it involves research into cutting edge medical technologies that could be used to save more lives on the battlefield. That’s all I can say about it. But it’s obvious that these conspiracy theorists just took a real project name and used it for their own purposes.

WB: So there never was a research team funded by USAMRIID that was slaughtered in the jungles of Central America while seeking a virus sample that could greatly boost human healing abilities?

MJS: Of course not. Unfortunately, we did have a team in that area that was researching a botany project, and they did sustain casualties after accidentally coming across some local drug runners, but that’s all it was.

WB: And the USAMRID does not have government agents recruiting death row prisoners to be the subjects of experimental drug trials?

MJS: Again, that’s ridiculous.

WB: So where have these prisoners gone, Major?

MJS: Considering they were death row inmates, I think it’s safe to say they got executed.

WB: I assume you’ll also deny the existence of this secret lab, hidden somewhere underground in the Rocky Mountains?

MJS: Absolutely.

WB: What about reports from Telluride, Colorado, of citizens having the same nightmares and behaving strangely?

MJS: Complete nonsense. I’m based in Telluride myself, and I sleep just fine.

WB: One last question, Major. A new wave of rumors regarding a small girl in Memphis being abducted by government agents have begun circulating today. Any comment?

MJS: The idea that the US Army had anything to do with abducting children is absurd, Wolf. Think about these stories. Does it really seem possible that the U.S. government has a secret base in Colorado where we’re experimenting with a virus on convicts and small children that turns them into some kind of Dracula-type creature with the ability to invade dreams and brainwash people. Seriously, what’s next? I’m sure the people who believe that will tell you that it’s inevitable that some kind of accident will unleash the virus on an unsuspecting public, and that the country will be consumed by a plague of these creatures until civilization is completely destroyed. And then what? Maybe a small handful of survivors will manage to establish a safe zone and a new type of society? Oh, and a couple of generations down the line, like a hundred years from now, a few of these survivors will embark on an odyssey to find the truth in a post-apocalyptic landscape? Does that really seem likely, Wolf?

WB: *chuckles* When you put it that way, Major, it does seem pretty far fetched….

WB: It appears we lost the link. So did we just see a US Army major get his face gnawed off by a vampire-like creature that he had just finished denying the existence of? Or is this just another internet hoax? We may never know. Up next, global warming critics continue to say that the whole thing is a liberal lie. ...more

A decent collection of zombie stories with a lot of variation from the usual George Romero-style zombie apocalypse. Stand outs include Joe Hill’s storA decent collection of zombie stories with a lot of variation from the usual George Romero-style zombie apocalypse. Stand outs include Joe Hill’s story told as a collection of Tweets from a bored teen-age girl on a family vacation that includes attending a zombie circus and Jonathan Maberry’s touching Family Business. Surprisingly, Joe Lansdale’s contribution isn’t really a zombie story at all so it seems a bit out of place despite being one of the better tales included. ...more